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webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of May, 2017.

Net neutrality is in jeopardy againMay 08, 2017(comments)
A web browser vendor would like your help defending its business model. Hackernews of all nations come together to trade misinformation and confusion about each other's local telecommunications regulation. Nothing productive occurs.

Get started making musicMay 09, 2017(comments)
A music software vendor would like your help bolstering its profit model. Hackernews spends a couple of days recommending inferior replacements for less money, before deciding that the music notation system in use for nearly a thousand years is ripe for disruption -- and this random collection of idiots on a web forum is just the group for the job.

A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition systemMay 10, 2017(comments)
A pizza shop billboard breaks, revealing that it was logging who looked at it. Hackernews is horrified, except for the people who were surprised everyone didn't know this. They sit down to construct a concept of privacy from first principle. They fail, but they have a good time whining about cashiers.

Recovering from Burnout and DepressionMay 11, 2017(comments)
An internet quits working and writes spammy blog shit for a living. Hackernews decides people don't like to work because all work is either meaningless or evil, but it's definitely everyone else's fault. Also the entire monetary system is worthless, we should envy the impoverished, capitalism will kill us all, and they all quit jobs they loved because someone was mean to them. The unanimous consensus: take a couple years off and just fuck around.

Cyberattacks in 12 Nations Said to Use Leaked N.S.A. Hacking ToolMay 12, 2017(comments)
An internet fucks up a lot of computers. Hackernews makes popcorn and sets about armchair-quarterbacking the past quarter-century of computing policy. Each Hackernews has a unique set of inviolate rules that would have prevented all of this. None of them are compatible with any of the others. Eventually, someone blames the actual concept of patriotism. Nobody fixes anything. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force executes a Hackernews on live television for daring to mention their name.

Accidentally Stopping a Global Cyber AttackMay 13, 2017(comments)
An internet squats a domain in some malware. It has the effect of stopping that version of the malware from spreading. Hackernews resumes the previous day's blame-assignment party (spoiler: "everyone but us").

Badger – A fast key-value store written natively in GoMay 14, 2017(comments)
Exhausted by the high-concept debate of the previous two days, Hackernews settles in for some good old-fashioned webshit. An internet makes a shitty database, which uses the phrase "SSD-optimized" to mean "we didn't do any write-combining and we assume you have no cache." The motivation for creating the shitty database boils down to "the one we were using wasn't written in a hipster language."